MATRIC RAGEGenna Gardini

COMMENDED FOR THE 2016 INGRID JONKER PRIZE FOR POETRY

“Beautiful. Complex and challenging without being obtuse. Straightforward without being crass. Kind and empathetic and shining with goodness, but still angry.” (BooksLive)

“Gardini’s poems ride on a wildness of heart that accumulates its expressive power image by image, each bursting with knowledge of what it is naming [...] This is a collection that delivers very much more than the “promise” of things to come.” (Chimurenga Chronic).

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The eagerly-awaited debut from one of the country’s most exciting young poets, Matric Rage is Genna Gardini’s reckoning with youth, womanhood and mortality. With hyper-literate, humorous and often heartbreaking poems, Gardini signals a wind change in South African poetry – where the personal is not just political, but polemical, too. In sickness and sex, misogyny and manners, this is a collection that, above all, showcases a powerful writer coming unapologetically into her own.

Genna Gardini, born in 1986, is the winner of the 2012 DALRO/New Coin Award and a 2013 Mail & Guardian Young South African. Born in Johannesburg and raised in Durban, Genna currently lives in Cape Town, where she works as a lecturer and critic.